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Month: October 2015

So I managed to complete the Birmingham half-marathon in 2 hours and 17 minutes. One of the things that has been imprinted on my memory is how the day seemed to bring out the best in all people.People all along the 13.1 mile route were handing out sweets, water, and shouts of encouragement directed at specific people – whether they were friends or not. Countless times I had people cheering me on from my name on my runners number.It makes all the difference.I especially found it great how even when running through areas of Birmingham that were less desirable – places where the people may normally be feared – had just the same encouragement and friendliness.

Laravel does a great job at protecting us from cross-site request forgeries – or C.S.R.F. for short.But sometimes you may not wish to have that layer present. Well with Laravel 5.1 you can very easily bypass this middleware, simply by populating an array in the following file:

app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php

Within this class you can add a protected property — an array — called $except, which will tell Laravel to use this middleware except for the ones you specify here.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see the one-night-only showing of Roger Waters’ The Wall at my local cinema. That performance rekindled my love for that album – indeed Pink Floyd in general.

Yesterday I revisted an older performance of the album, which was given at the Berlin wall at the time when it was being torn down.

Very apt.

This performance of The Wall is unique, in that many of the songs are performed by guest artists. My personal favorites of these perfomances are Bryan Adam’s “Young Lust”, Paul Carrack’s “Hey You” and Van Morrison’s “Comfortably Numb”.

For any fans of The Wall, this album is a milestone performance and must be experienced.

My very first album write up goes to Tove Styrke’s Kiddo. I had never heard of her before tonight – she was a recommendation by Google Play Music, based on my interest in ‘Say Lou Lou’.

As soon as the first song started, I was hooked. Hooked enough to take advantage of my Android 6.0 update’s new context awareness by demanding – “Google! Play me her first album”* – that one is also great.

The first song sounded to be very Prince-esque – purple rain Prince – which can only be a good thing. Then there were other songs that had the sort of catchy hooks and beats you can’t help but move your body to. I had been getting nowhere with what I was building tonight, which was annoying, but this album soon got me feeling on top of the world.

Stand out songs: Borderline, Even If I’m Loud It Doesn’t Mean I’m Talking To You, Walking a Line.